Crazy Transit Pitches

[Tallguy]

In what world are Green Line to Saugus and Green Line as Urban Ring mutually exclusive? And the UR wont solve all of the111 busses problems either.

 

[Tallguy]

So, the actual Saugus ROW is about one car length from the light at Main St. Carpocalypse? Hardly.
At Fleet St the Northern edge of the ROW is actually a few feet north of the extant stopline. Again, hardly a "carpocalypse".
The ROW @ Holden and Rt 60 goes through the intersection of 60E and about 30 ft east on 60W an offset of 2 car lengths.
As far as Franklin through Cross, they are all relatively small one way neighborhood streets. Only Bryant has stoplights. These are not major arteries. Faulkner and Cross are one block long.
Bryant, Faulkner and Cross are within a 600 ft section
Rt 99 and Beach will require some signal management, but 99 should be a stop anyways, and Lynn and Wesley should have a light anyways. I am not saying that there are no issues with the route, but it is not the disaster you are portraying. Am I saying that it is the first item on my wish list? No. But it is a good solid option after the Green Line goes to Sullivan and Everett/Chelsea (and West Medford,.. and Needham...and Dudley [in no particular order])

 

[ulrichomega]

So, the actual Saugus ROW is about one car length from the light at Main St. Carpocalypse? Hardly.
At Fleet St the Northern edge of the ROW is actually a few feet north of the extant stopline. Again, hardly a "carpocalypse".
The ROW @ Holden and Rt 60 goes through the intersection of 60E and about 30 ft east on 60W an offset of 2 car lengths.
As far as Franklin through Cross, they are all relatively small one way neighborhood streets. Only Bryant has stoplights. These are not major arteries. Faulkner and Cross are one block long.
Bryant, Faulkner and Cross are within a 600 ft section
Rt 99 and Beach will require some signal management, but 99 should be a stop anyways, and Lynn and Wesley should have a light anyways. I am not saying that there are no issues with the route, but it is not the disaster you are portraying. Am I saying that it is the first item on my wish list? No. But it is a good solid option after the Green Line goes to Sullivan and Everett/Chelsea (and West Medford,.. and Needham...and Dudley [in no particular order])

Agreed. This isn't a high priority extension, but it seems like an obvious one after we've nailed a few other Green Line extensions. It won't be the cheapest one that's ever been done, but it's hardly the impossible feat of engineering that something like burying the Grand Junction under Main would be. Personally I'd much rather have an activation of that ROW come from up in Everett as that seems to serve more people assuming urban-ring-as-light-rail happens.

So basically:

1. 1/Pines Pond
2. Linden
3. 99/Maplewood
4. Cross St
5. Dana St
6. Malden Square
7. Bell Rock
8. Park L
9. Santilli Circle
10. Encore
11. Sullivan

EDIT: Heck, if you shift the far end of this down to the Showcase and through the traffic circle you can take over the old Rt 1 ROW and send this thing all the way out to Lynn through the swamp. Obviously that's an entirely new order of magnitude of funding and effort for a lot of rail through a place not many people want to go, but if we can't get the Blue Line out there, why not?

 

[ulrichomega]

To expand on this, I've been tinkering with a map of the Far Future Green Line for a little bit now, and this extension plays into it. Here's my attempt at representing it in MetroMapMaker:

Forgive the sloppiness of it, I've been doing most of my work in a local copy of enmodal. The major builds here are:

• Construction of the Stuard St Subway or Marginal Road Subway to take the E and D branches out of the Boylston Street Subway.
• Build the Essex St Subway to send at least one branch of the Boylston St Subway down to South Station and along the Transitway. I have this ending at SIlverline Way to avoid traffic mixing, but you can obviously extend from there.
• Reactivate the flying junction at the Pleasant Street Incline to accept the line to Dudley (and build the line to Dudley).
• The one I think is the most money for the least gain: New subway from the Pleasant St Incline, down to Marginal St. and around to some connection to the Essex St subway. This allows trains from the north to go to the Seaport, which radically improves connections, but this is going to be a bear to build.
• Conversion of Grand Junction to Light Rail, and extension through Sullivan to connect to the Chelsea busway.
• The conversation topic above: Reactivation of the Saugus branch. I'd plan to send two lines over this one because of how the tracks would probably be laid out in the new maintenance yard, making it easier to send trains to both the Central Subway and along the Grand Junction. I believe F-Line has a map somewhere that details this.
• Some hand-waved path through Allston to the Harvard tunnels. This area is undergoing so many changes there's not much that can be detailed here. I'm not happy with this being the terminus of one of the Sullivan/Malden branches, but nothing else really made sense.
• Ignore the Urban Ring going through Kenmore and down to Brookline. This routing simply won't work because of the track layout in Kenmore.
• You could obviously extend the Porter branch out further. I don't include that here because it gets unwieldy quickly.

Obviously there are issues. The biggest is cost, but this is more an exploration of what's possible than an actual proposal. The next is probably Central Subway capacity, which is why I tried to minimize lines going all the way through (making use of the Brattle Loop, turning lines at Park, etc.). The second major issue is that I think there's going to be load imbalances on the northside lines that will be hard to compensate for. The branch to the Mystic Valley Parkway is probably going to be overloaded, but I don't see any way to get more service through there. This is about as much as the Central Subway can hold, I think. That makes me want to send more down the Grand Junction from it, but those tracks are being built right now, and they're not lined up for that. I wonder if it would be possible to overbuild Lechmere with a reversing section to bounce some small service back out along the Grand Junction?

 

[HelloBostonHi]

So I've been thinking, what Boston really needs is its own version of London's Crossrail and Sydney's Metro, a brand new tunnel through central boston carrying new heavy rail rapid transit to new places. Not more extensions and LRV conversions. Looking at underserved areas I'm thinking a fully underground line coming in from Dudley Square, curve through south boston, hit up south station, then north station, then loop around Charlestown, then Chelsea and end around airport station. Solves NS link, the SL1 mess, etc. Would cost buckets of money and take at least a decade but you know just being visionary here. I'm sure someone else has a slightly better way to route it though.. I just wish boston would start looking at building a brand new, tunnel boring machine, fully underground HRT line instead of dumping billions on things like NSRL

 

[cats10000]

The NSRL IS Boston’s version of crossrail.

 

[Equilibria]

The NSRL IS Boston’s version of crossrail.

I disagree, but neither is HBHi's vision for a new transit line. I don't really think that a long crosstown RER tunnel like Crossrail has much of a reasonable analog here, at least for a few decades if urban rail really takes off.

 

[JeffDowntown]

I disagree, but neither is HBHi's vision for a new transit line. I don't really think that a long crosstown RER tunnel like Crossrail has much of a reasonable analog here, at least for a few decades if urban rail really takes off.

Well, I disagree with your disagree (but only slightly).

1) Boston is so much smaller than London, that it is unlikely we will ever need a long RER crosstown tunnel.

2) But our smaller cross downtown tunnel proposal (NSRL) manages to interconnect ALL of our potential RER lines, so it is really a Crossrail on steroids. (Because we only have two rail terminuses to connect, unlike London).

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Well, I disagree with your disagree (but only slightly).

1) Boston is so much smaller than London, that it is unlikely we will ever need a long RER crosstown tunnel.

Agree. The London comparison is spurious for an area this compact. But we did study the Urban Ring...and while woefully short of detail in the scoping report they did envision Phase III as a dedicated ROW that would be mostly tunneled on the south end. So somebody did think in Crossrail-ish terms before.

The reality, unfortunately, is that the tunneling costs are so horrendous that it's just not buildable even in a free-spending transit universe. The street grid--especially on the Southwest quadrant--is far too fractured, with bad angles galore, and blocks that go wide to narrow and back again. It's almost 4x as long as NSRL, spans bedrock and multiple generations of landfilling, and is in general so heterogeneous in properties that multiple significant-length sections of both cut-and-cover and TBM'ing would be needed. It's not an exaggeration that the total cost...just on the south half...could end up nearly as high as the Big Dig.

A radial line in Boston is not going to carry as many people as the Big Dig in a given day. That has to be considered a line in the sand on what's worth consideration at all. UR Phase III is hardly the Red Line even on its best day...because we're still a far cry from London on our busiest day. Our 'spoke' lines through downtown are still going to be load-bearing. The UR is absolutely worth doing on whatever mode we can do it, but ridership on the radial is always going to be proportional to the spoke lines. There's no way to add up the through-and-through Red/Orange/Green/Blue trunks and somehow come up proportional radial ridership that begats a Crossrail comparison. That's a leap above.

2) But our smaller cross downtown tunnel proposal (NSRL) manages to interconnect ALL of our potential RER lines, so it is really a Crossrail on steroids. (Because we only have two rail terminuses to connect, unlike London).

I don't know if this the right analogy, either. I fail to see any remote relation between an intentional radial service and one that's merely connecting the dots between mainlines on each side of a break already pointing as if they should run thru. I'm even more confused as to why these projects would be pitched as competing with each other. I mean, UR Phase III might literally cost twice as much as NSRL to do up as heavy rail...so it's certainly not a cost rationalization.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Who said anything about going up on 93?

You did:

No, but if the Orange Line is extended to Reading (likely with electrification ) the Green Line could continue north from Sullivan, over the Medford Branch to the Fellsway, up the median to 93 and then down beside 93 (one track per side) (nearly) to Medford Sq. Personally, I could also see another branch up to Malden Ctr ad over the Saugus Branch, at least to the cinema parking lot if not to Saugus Ctr.

You're going to put a trolley through a highway interchange rotary??? Remember how well that worked out for the A-Line at Newton Corner??? Gone within 4 years of the Pike's opening.

And there are only three cross streets on the Fellsway in 1.5 miles and another 1/2 mile to the CR lines. Yes, the half mile down Brookside Parkway(a 65ft ROW) has a street crossing at Webster and the tracks need to cross from the east side of Brookside to the west just before the off ramp. That gets you to City Hall. Six street crossings in 4 miles and you're at Assembly. 20 min to Haymarket, tops

This is not your great grandpappy's Fellsway: https://youtu.be/WesgTvAkMOE.

A 10 ft. median is not going to host a trolley reservation. You would have to squeeze the shoulders as tight as Huntington Ave. to regain clearance for a reservation...on a MassHighway-managed parkway, not a city street. So this roundabout diversion very much suffers from traffic effects if you don't get every last bit of that reservation space forked over. If you have to do any amount of street-running, even semi-separated to the left of the yellow stripe, it's going to dramatically slow down the trip.

Then there's the illogic of >3.5 miles north, west, and south out of Wellington to reach a destination that's 2 miles due west of Wellington via Route 16. That's...awful transit. In what universe does a transit trip require you to swing closer to the Middlesex Fells to get between two destinations that are on the Mystic River? The 95, 101, 103, and 134 can somehow get between Orange and Medford Sq. without knotting themselves like a pretzel and going miles out of the way. If that can't be done with another mode, maybe there's a big problem with the mode selection. People are going to notice that they're running around in circles. They don't like it on the bus routes that do it; they won't like it on a so-called rapid transit line, either.

In what world are Green Line to Saugus and Green Line as Urban Ring mutually exclusive? And the UR wont solve all of the111 busses problems either.

Why are you bringing up the 111? It's far from either of your proposals.

But here's one problem the as-planned UR does solve: it hits that bus square in the middle and serves up transfers to Orange and Blue 1-2 mi. / 2-3 stops in each direction from the Chelsea transfer, as well as run-thru options on Green. That's the UR in a nutshell: quick-hit transfers from intercepted Key Routes. That's useful.

Between Malden Ctr. and Linden Sq. the Saugus Branch duplicates but never touches the 106, 108, 411, 430 from 500-1250 ft. away, and small portions of the 105 and 109 also without a touch until Linden. You're not scooping up transfers or bringing multimodal value-addeds that way.

So, the actual Saugus ROW is about one car length from the light at Main St. Carpocalypse? Hardly.
At Fleet St the Northern edge of the ROW is actually a few feet north of the extant stopline. Again, hardly a "carpocalypse".
The ROW @ Holden and Rt 60 goes through the intersection of 60E and about 30 ft east on 60W an offset of 2 car lengths.
As far as Franklin through Cross, they are all relatively small one way neighborhood streets. Only Bryant has stoplights. These are not major arteries. Faulkner and Cross are one block long.
Bryant, Faulkner and Cross are within a 600 ft section
Rt 99 and Beach will require some signal management, but 99 should be a stop anyways, and Lynn and Wesley should have a light anyways. I am not saying that there are no issues with the route, but it is not the disaster you are portraying. Am I saying that it is the first item on my wish list? No. But it is a good solid option after the Green Line goes to Sullivan and Everett/Chelsea (and West Medford,.. and Needham...and Dudley [in no particular order])

There are many, many issues with the route...because being too askew from traffic signals to coordinate phases and queues is a recipe for congestion. Now multiply that out by the number of crossings with that characteristic, and it's a problem.

Lest we forget, what you are asking for here are the FIFTH and SIXTH northern branches of the Green Line: Medford, Union, Urban Ring Cambridge (branch off Union), Urban Ring Chelsea, the Fellsway loop-de-loop, and Saugus Branch. The latter two predicated on Orange Line to Reading as build requirements, and tearing apart part of Orange from Sullivan to past Wellington. This is more than Kenmore fed at its busiest-ever when the D and A coexisted, and the conditions put on the Orange Line for the build are untenable for planning purposes.

Even with the two UR branches trading off thru-radial routings with Lechmere-inbound routings for service variety, that's an extreme amount of traffic to be dispatching out of the north end. To have two of those branches addled by many mixed-traffic impacts is going to make for frustrating delays when a blown schedule hits Brickbottom Jct. And it'll drag down the other branches with grade separation as an unintended effect. The Kenmore end is not going to attempt to saddle itself with more unless the subway gets extended to BU Bridge for that Urban Ring hook-in, and a surface D-to-E connection allows for some fileting of load-bearing short-turn service so they can work in Needham without hiccups. Brickbottom Jct. is getting built plenty robustly for GLX and the future Ring appendages, but it's got its limits. Six north branches is well past the limit.

Transforming the Green Line doesn't involve adding more B Lines. It's not in the business of replacing bus routes that could be tuned. The future involves more interconnects, more radial paths around downtown, more touches that enhance buses at node points, more fluidity. Not a return to the 1920's with more linear streetcar routes because streetcar = kewl.

 

[cats10000]

The NSRL is more like thameslink actually.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

To expand on this, I've been tinkering with a map of the Far Future Green Line for a little bit now, and this extension plays into it. Here's my attempt at representing it in MetroMapMaker:

Forgive the sloppiness of it, I've been doing most of my work in a local copy of enmodal. The major builds here are:

• Construction of the Stuard St Subway or Marginal Road Subway to take the E and D branches out of the Boylston Street Subway.
• Build the Essex St Subway to send at least one branch of the Boylston St Subway down to South Station and along the Transitway. I have this ending at SIlverline Way to avoid traffic mixing, but you can obviously extend from there.

If they pick up Transitway-Downtown for re-study as LRT, they'll work up the Essex St. Alternative again simply because that was the best-studied one when it was Silver Line Phase III. But its chances are not good because of the expense incurred by structurally underpinning Boylston Station and Chinatown Station (with a double-decker Silver platform, making it 3 stories deep!!!), and the mitigation costs incurred by the digging under very narrow Essex.

The killer flaws that need to be corrected to net a cost estimate that's actually buildable are:

• Fewest structural underpins possible. Offset, rather than stacked, stations.
• Fewer touches of old infrastructure. 20th c. widened streets, 1960's urban renewal property >>> "Old Boston" 19th c. buildings + poorly documented utilities.
• Less duplication of infrastructure. Re-use outer Boylston platforms + some/all of Tremont tunnel instead of building twice, resorting to ham-fisted geometry to make transfers.

That probably means you're doing a South End jog, hitting Orange-Tufts Med. Ctr. with a connecting concourse, and looking for wide and/or urban renewal streets (Kneeland, Marginal...more than one way to try it). Then hitting the pre-provisioned trajectory into the Transitway at the north tip of Chinatown Park. And keep in mind: as BRT the Essex tunnel was to be so godawful dog slow that nearly all service would be forced to loop from either side at Boylston for dispatching sanity. So a trolley on fixed track is going to make this trip faster than SL Phase III ever would've even if the path is no longer straight as the crow flies and looks underwhelmingly indirect on a 2D map. SL Phase III would've been way, way worse than the Transitway crawl.

It's less about having a "favorite" routing than maximizing the build odds...because we should've already had this but those bulleted pitfalls above torpedoed the cost. It's a billions-dollar project, but we want a "buildable" digit stuck onto the front.

• Reactivate the flying junction at the Pleasant Street Incline to accept the line to Dudley (and build the line to Dudley).
• The one I think is the most money for the least gain: New subway from the Pleasant St Incline, down to Marginal St. and around to some connection to the Essex St subway. This allows trains from the north to go to the Seaport, which radically improves connections, but this is going to be a bear to build.

As above, think efficiency + minimal pitfalls to lift up the Seaport connection to the realm of buildability. Tremont tunnel is 4 tracks...right there you've got grade separation for 2 branches. Can you utilize 2 tracks for the Seaport branch and 2 tracks for the Dudley branch? Or can you plow that 4-track tunnel past Tufts station down Tremont, set up 2 of the tracks to go to the Seaport + Dudley, and leave a 2-track stub to continue west as the "new" E to Back Bay + Prudential. Such that the Huntington tunnel eventually gets extended to become an "alt. spine".

Does the fact that you've provisioned for 3 builds in one...and recycled the entirety of the Tremont tunnel...and tied all these near- and far-future services together at a Tufts transfer station with Orange connection...make the cost of some of these components easier to swallow?


^This^ isn't the only way to do it, but you've got to be ruthlessly efficient with how far you stretch your dollar to find justification for going for it at the places where SL Phase III belly-flopped. Anything that's an exponential service increaser, like for example pooling services at the Orange transfer node and recycling an existing 4-track tunnel to do it...has to be put on the table. Value proposition has to get stacked wherever it can to make the expense less-scary to appropriate.

• Conversion of Grand Junction to Light Rail, and extension through Sullivan to connect to the Chelsea busway.
• The conversation topic above: Reactivation of the Saugus branch. I'd plan to send two lines over this one because of how the tracks would probably be laid out in the new maintenance yard, making it easier to send trains to both the Central Subway and along the Grand Junction. I believe F-Line has a map somewhere that details this.
• Some hand-waved path through Allston to the Harvard tunnels. This area is undergoing so many changes there's not much that can be detailed here. I'm not happy with this being the terminus of one of the Sullivan/Malden branches, but nothing else really made sense.
• Ignore the Urban Ring going through Kenmore and down to Brookline. This routing simply won't work because of the track layout in Kenmore.

As in my last reply, that's way way too many northern branches to dispatch...and the fact that the non-UR additions are subject to the chaos of hard-to-control grade crossings offset too far from nearest traffic lights means schedule dominoes are going to start falling regularly.


The Cambridge Ring is absolutely positively essential. Kenmore is the tie-in destination, because the south-half Ring that's going to have to be BRT originates there. Filet service between the Kenmore circuit and Harvard Branch as suitable, but anyone waiting on the westbound platform at Kendall surface station must be able to hit Kenmore on at least every other train. Bio-metropolis over in Cambridge needs to be able to pick up a quick transfer to Longwood; that shouldn't even be a question.

Capacity won't be a problem with the short subway extension dug under the Comm Ave. reservation to BU Bridge (hillside portal for the UR + Harvard Branch, new B portal before St. Paul St.). You have all the GLT enhancements clamping down on the rest of the "garbage-in, garbage-out" syndrome. And if you are intent on relocating the E off Copley Jct. (see previous comment about how that can interface with the Seaport) then the entire Central Subway out to the 4-track Boylston-Park segment will have its traffic sorted no later than the Kenmore platforms and will no longer be upset by E's barging into line @ Copley.

• You could obviously extend the Porter branch out further. I don't include that here because it gets unwieldy quickly.

Watertown's pretty straightforward. It'd be about 3/4 mile of street-running (though perhaps with reservation'ed platforms) on Arsenal St. at the very tail end...not enough length to kill an inbound schedule to Lechmere. But other than that the routing is very direct and structurally simple (2 shallow duck-unders of Sherman St. and Fresh Pond Pkwy. being the most concrete poured). On cost and buildability it's a good one. It's just not as mission-critical as the biggies. We REALLY REALLY need the Seaport connection, the NW+NE Ring quadrants, Dudley streetcar, the Porter transfer, Needham (for all the well-documented RER-driven reasons), and the E Back Bay relocation. Watertown just doesn't have any oxygen when that's the five-alarm needs list.

Obviously there are issues. The biggest is cost, but this is more an exploration of what's possible than an actual proposal. The next is probably Central Subway capacity, which is why I tried to minimize lines going all the way through (making use of the Brattle Loop, turning lines at Park, etc.). The second major issue is that I think there's going to be load imbalances on the northside lines that will be hard to compensate for. The branch to the Mystic Valley Parkway is probably going to be overloaded, but I don't see any way to get more service through there. This is about as much as the Central Subway can hold, I think. That makes me want to send more down the Grand Junction from it, but those tracks are being built right now, and they're not lined up for that. I wonder if it would be possible to overbuild Lechmere with a reversing section to bounce some small service back out along the Grand Junction?

As I said, that's just too many northern branches. And that's a bad thing if the extras exert any destabilizing effect on a load-bearing branch like the Urban Ring segments. Or Medford, for that matter...that one's got insane potential to completely blow its projections out of the water and require more service. And you can't do much more than is already going up. Lechmere is a pretty snug fit across the street, so there isn't a turnback until Brattle Loop. The problem with having crossing-heavy branches added to the 2 grade separated GLX's and the 2 very nearly grade separated Ring routes is that if one of these extra builds stubs its toes in crossing traffic in Malden it's already started dragging the rest down for several stops before it ever gets the chance to dump out at Brattle. And that's doubly ungood for whatever other branches are running at much denser frequencies when they get tripped up (like two 3-min. headway 3-car trains becoming late because of a 6-min. headway 2-car train, and relative numbers of riders impacted).

 

[cats10000]

If the Massachusetts central RR is reactivated is there enough space for a rail with trail.

 

[whittle]

The NSRL is more like thameslink actually.

The tunnel used by Thameslink through central London is 150 years old. The Thameslink Programme was about improving access to said tunnel.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

If the Massachusetts central RR is reactivated is there enough space for a rail with trail.

Maybe, because once it crosses Route 128 in Waltham it starts getting pretty rustic. The power line towers could be a bit of a problem.

They did study restoration in 1996: http://www.mapc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Central-Mass-Commuter-Rail-Feasibility-Study-1996.pdf

That project would've forked off the Fitchburg Line right after 128 and not used the duplicate Waltham section. 31 total miles from North Station, 53 minute travel time, outermost stop a Zone 7. Studied stops were:

Wayland [to 1971]
South Sudbury [to 1971]
Hudson [new location]
West Berlin/495 [new station]

It omitted B&M-era stops:
Weston [to 1971; 3/4 mile down same street from Kendal Green]
Cherry Brook [to 1971; 1.9 mi. down same street from Silver Hill]
Tower Hill [to 1971]
East Sudbury [to 1971, after Wayland]
Ordway [to 1965, after South Sudbury]
Gleasondale [to 1965; west of proposed new Hudson station]
Hudson [to 1958; on Marlborough Branch to 1965]
South Bolton [to 1958]
Berlin [to 1958]


The ridership projections stunk too much for even 'inflation' between the stone ages of '96 and today's commute market to push into viability: 1295 inbound trips per day...or about 45% what Greenbush averages. And only 580 all-new transit riders.

The big problem holding it back was the station locations. As you can see from the Street View linkies...there's a whole lot of nothing around too many of these places. Now, even with the study doing some very retro kvetching about parking lot capacity and bollixing up the Hudson station location by taking it way out of downtown...there's just not a lot of sizzle in these locations.

• The Weston stops weren't even included because they're duplicate to the Fitchburg Line boutique stops and far off-center from the downtown area. Running a bus from the 128 superstation on Route 20 would give more Westonites better transit than anything on the Central Mass OR Fitchburg Lines. Absolutely nowhere can you park a car at these stops, and it's required because they all sit on roads too narrow for buses and too narrow/treacherous to walk. It's a long gap between stops to omit this town, but it's undeniable: these station sites are all zeroes.

• The Wayland station is very nicely-placed. The '96 study proposed going behind it to the shopping plaza backlots. Ample parking, goodish TOD for a small town...and at a major crossroads at the intersection of US 20/MA 27. Still a very small town, though...but at least a station site with a puncher's chance by small town standards.

• South Sudbury is in a mix of industrial and commercial, with okayish residential density. This was the highest-ridership stop as of end of service in 1971. No real crossroads here as everything is oriented around 20. Because it's another very small town, they'd have to have a cohesive TOD strategy for the somewhat disorganized station surroundings to work this to any kind of success.

• Hudson: absolutely horrible, no-good site selection for their stop. Nearly 3 miles from a dense downtown??? Study wanted a parking sink, but it badly misjudged the TOD potential of a smallish industrial park that has a lot of crap like auto chop shops in it. The only way they have a chance is downtown at the old Railroad Ave. station site. Which has extremely limited parking, so some thought has to be put into bus connections.

• West Berlin/495 could have been the system's most desolate parking lot. There is nothing...literally nothing nearby. Worse, if you built Northborough/I-290 commuter rail on the very much active Fitchburg Secondary you'd have a much more robust Pn'R 5 miles and 2 exits away that hits a very good industrial park for TOD. And can run buses from there to downtown Hudson via the MA 85 expressway stub. So these two Pn'R's in Hudson and Berlin that they were hinging the whole line's fortunes on...don't really matter much if southside expansion beats them to the punch.

The study's an interesting read, if for no other reason than it gives an obscure subject a full workup. But you can pretty much write this line off as a never-will-be because it simply goes out of its way to avoid as many people as possible. While the few people it does tap can be served more immediately by other options, like infilling local bus frequencies to meet the nearest souped-up Fitchburg, Worcester, or Northborough/TBD RER frequencies.

 

[Tallguy]

You did:



I did no such thing. I said beside-adjacent, next to





You're going to put a trolley through a highway interchange rotary??? Remember how well that worked out for the A-Line at Newton Corner??? Gone within 4 years of the Pike's opening.

Not through, beside. there is enough room on the west side of the Medford rotary to get the tracks to Joan’s? Hair salon. Ideally, take that one house for a terminus.

This is not your great grandpappy's Fellsway: https://youtu.be/WesgTvAkMOE.

A 10 ft. median is not going to host a trolley reservation. You would have to squeeze the shoulders as tight as Huntington Ave. to regain clearance for a reservation...on a MassHighway-managed parkway, not a city street. So this roundabout diversion very much suffers from traffic effects if you don't get every last bit of that reservation space forked over. If you have to do any amount of street-running, even semi-separated to the left of the yellow stripe, it's going to dramatically slow down the trip.




The Fellsway is 95 ft wide. And if that isn’t enough, there is 5-6 ft of grass on each side before you hit the sidewalk




Then there's the illogic of >3.5 miles north, west, and south out of Wellington to reach a destination that's 2 miles due west of Wellington via Route 16.
That's...awful transit.


Except Google Maps puts it at 3 miles and 16 min on the bus. On Saturday. At 3pm.


In what universe does a transit trip require you to swing closer to the Middlesex Fells to get between two destinations that are on the Mystic River? The 95, 101, 103, and 134 can somehow get between Orange and Medford Sq. without knotting themselves like a pretzel and going miles out of the way.





again, .5 miles and hella less than 16 min. AND, no need to get off the bus, walk up the ramp,and wait for the next train at Wellington.

If that can't be done with another mode, maybe there's a big problem with the mode selection. People are going to notice that they're running around in circles. They don't like it on the bus routes that do it; they won't like it on a so-called rapid transit line, either.



An arc , yes. But hardly circles. And at least 10 min faster to Haymarket




Why are you bringing up the 111? It's far from either of your proposals.



So, taking 800-1000 cars off Rt 1 in Revere will have no impact on Rt 1 on the Tobin?



But here's one problem the as-planned UR does solve: it hits that bus square in the middle and serves up transfers to Orange and Blue 1-2 mi. / 2-3 stops in each direction from the Chelsea transfer, as well as run-thru options on Green. That's the UR in a nutshell: quick-hit transfers from intercepted Key Routes. That's useful.


Another straw man. They are not mutually exclusive. In fact,any people using Saugus or Medford who are going to Kendall or Allston can switch at Sullivan, which could obviate the need for a station at the intersection of UR and The DE line.


Between Malden Ctr. and Linden Sq. the Saugus Branch duplicates but never touches the 106, 108, 411, 430 from 500-1250 ft. away, and small portions of the 105 and 109 also without a touch until Linden. You're not scooping up transfers or bringing multimodal value-addeds that way.

So you MODIFY THE BUS ROUTES!



There are many, many issues with the route...because being too askew from traffic signals to coordinate phases and queues is a recipe for congestion. Now multiply that out by the number of crossings with that characteristic, and it's a problem.

In your opinion. I disagree.

Lest we forget, what you are asking for here are the FIFTH and SIXTH northern branches of the Green Line: Medford, Union, Urban Ring Cambridge (branch off Union), Urban Ring Chelsea, the Fellsway loop-de-loop, and Saugus Branch. The latter two predicated on Orange Line to Reading as build requirements, and tearing apart part of Orange from Sullivan to past Wellington.



Tearing apart? You mean actually using the third OL track and the CR rail?

So UR runs from West Station to Sullivan. It shares the line with Saugus and Medford(3 lines)



Saugus and Medford share Lechmere to North Station with D&E(4 lines) The Central Subway handles that every day. And B,C,and D run every 6 min and E every 9. I would suggest that Saugus and Medford run every 9 like the E. That would be 4.5trains every 9 min instead of the 5.5 trains every 9 the Central Subway sees


This is more than Kenmore fed at its busiest-ever when the D and A coexisted, and the conditions put on the Orange Line for the build are untenable for planning purposes.



Not even a clue of what your point is here. If you are talking about getting the GL from west of Sullivan to east of Assembly, how do you expect to get to Sullivan from Chelsea? Airlift? No, by getting GL over/under OL somewhere between Sullivan and Assembly.



Even with the two UR branches trading off thru-radial routings with Lechmere-inbound routings for service variety, that's an extreme amount of traffic to be dispatching out of the north end.


The Urban Ring should not be at Lechmere.



To have two of those branches addled by many mixed-traffic impacts is going to make for frustrating delays when a blown schedule hits Brickbottom Jct. And it'll drag down the other branches with grade separation as an unintended effect. The Kenmore end is not going to attempt to saddle itself with more unless the subway gets extended to BU Bridge for that Urban Ring hook-in,



Again my earlier comments suggested Saugus and Medford come after Urban Ring. I also assume that one of them might turn around at Gov Center.


and a surface D-to-E connection allows for some fileting of load-bearing short-turn service so they can work in Needham without hiccups.

Also, no disagreement


Brickbottom Jct. is getting built plenty robustly for GLX and the future Ring appendages, but it's got its limits. Six north branches is well past the limit.



Again, no track sees 6 branches, and I think calling the UR TWO branches is disengenous.



Transforming the Green Line doesn't involve adding more B Lines. It's not in the business of replacing bus routes that could be tuned. The future involves more interconnects, more radial paths around downtown, more touches that enhance buses at node points, more fluidity. Not a return to the 1920's with more linear streetcar routes because streetcar = kewl.

No, but Green Line = used. People would rather use the trolley instead the bus. Instead of telling people that spinach is good for them, give them steak.

I apologize to folks, but I had trouble picking out each quote so I commented point by point after F LINE

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

No, but Green Line = used. People would rather use the trolley instead the bus. Instead of telling people that spinach is good for them, give them steak.

I would posit finding some evidence to back up such a bold statement, but I know that ship has sailed. In your mind, this is modal warfare: anything on steel wheels is better than anything on rubber tires, regardless of the service offered. I'm asking what is it about a such a convoluted routing, with so many conditions levied on it (Orange-Reading, reworking a large chunk of Orange, reconstructing 1.5 miles of a state parkway for a reservation, ROW acquisition beside an Interstate highway) to function at all, that makes it good TRANSIT. Ditto your 6th GL-north branch to Saugus with all its own traffic impacts, and how you're going to integrate two brittle schedules into the Green Line without gumming up Union, Medford, UR NW, and UR NE at the Brickbottom merge.

One is an argument of intensity-of-belief, one is an argument of facts and empirical comparison with other routes. I think you need to account for why no other routes in the area choose such pretzeled routings and how systemwide--all-modes--the twisted routings fare in relation to more direct routes. On the evidence that clearly is not so strong a rider behavior characteristic as you're assuming it is. I think you need to account for the feasibility of any project with so many separate prerequisite builds if it is to exist at all, and how you're ever going to stage so many separate builds in separate jurisdictions to...make...it...all...so. How much is Orange-Reading going to cost and how many years will it take to even give you any path at all to the Medford Branch and Saugus Branch before spending another load to rework a 2.5 mi. stretch of Orange ROW? How is it the mere existence of steel wheels that makes Fellsway a more viable transit route when that's contingent on MassHighway spending 9 figures separately to rip the everloving crap out of the roadway to radically compact it and make a reservation. How can any planner expect to just wave those things off as foregone conclusions??? And since we're talking modes, why is bus congestion and troubleshooting therein so stinky-poo while there is no consideration whatsoever being given to the network effects of merging SIX branches at Brickbottom. We point fingers all the time at Kenmore's 3 branches and the future mitigation that's needed there to pare back "garbage-in/garbage-out" from the B and C. But are the chaos effects of mixed-traffic running under street signals somehow not a concern at Brickbottom because of the magic of steel wheels on Fellsway and all those askew Saugus Branch crossings???


I've been through enough of these arguments on AB to know that you cannot argue rationally with pure intensity-of-belief, and you will never convince someone deep in the modal warfare trenches that flawed transit is flawed transit is flawed transit. Their choice of vehicle is already the hammer looking for every nail: nothing more needs to be considered because "_RT = voila!", project flaws don't need to be corrected because of "Y mode sux!" irrelevance and near-religious belief that their mode choice is self-correcting, and every prospective rider believes exactly the same as they do.

Been there, done that. Too many times. Believe what you want to believe, but on the merits these are deeply flawed proposals that assume way too much about their project areas, prerequisite infrastructure, system integration, and rider behavior. All that stuff doesn't get waved away because you believe harder in it than the next person.

 

[cats10000]

Is it possible to connect the appalachian trail to the mass central rail trail.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

Is it possible to connect the appalachian trail to the mass central rail trail.

Yikes. It's about 30 miles between Northampton and the nearest passing of the App Trail, with some rough terrain in-between. I seriously doubt it. The B&A and Fitchburg Main were the only two RR's ever chartered that passed through the border of Berkshire County to any of the neighboring counties to the east...so there aren't any unused RR ROW's available at all. Nor is rail-with-trail a possibility on those two hugely busy freight lines, as some of the cuts/fills/ledges done through tricky terrain are no wider than the in-use trackbed. There may be a maze-like spaghetti map of hiking trails available that span much of the distance, but you'd be talking very circuitous routes, unmaintained surfaces, and a lot of grades so steep a complete trip by mountain bike would be out of the question...and possibly some climbing gear required.


Central Mass trail is also far from finished. Between Clinton and Belchertown the RR was abandoned in pieces between 1933-38, so property acquisition is a bear. Most of what's trailed or planned for trail is on the MBTA-owned section Waltham to Hudson, the Mass Water Resources Authority-owned section around Wachusett Reservoir, and the Northampton-Belchertown section spanning the Conn River Line and NECR mainline (re-named the Wheelwright Branch after the mainline was severed in the middle) abandoned by B&M in 1979. The roadbed on the Depression-era abandonment is remarkably unencroached after all this time, but there's still huge amounts of legal work to do before they can span Worcester County with a connecting trail between T territory and the Wheelwright Branch.

 

[ulrichomega]

If they pick up Transitway-Downtown for re-study as LRT, they'll work up the Essex St. Alternative again simply because that was the best-studied one when it was Silver Line Phase III. But its chances are not good because of the expense incurred by structurally underpinning Boylston Station and Chinatown Station (with a double-decker Silver platform, making it 3 stories deep!!!), and the mitigation costs incurred by the digging under very narrow Essex.

The killer flaws that need to be corrected to net a cost estimate that's actually buildable are:

• Fewest structural underpins possible. Offset, rather than stacked, stations.
• Fewer touches of old infrastructure. 20th c. widened streets, 1960's urban renewal property >>> "Old Boston" 19th c. buildings + poorly documented utilities.
• Less duplication of infrastructure. Re-use outer Boylston platforms + some/all of Tremont tunnel instead of building twice, resorting to ham-fisted geometry to make transfers.

That probably means you're doing a South End jog, hitting Orange-Tufts Med. Ctr. with a connecting concourse, and looking for wide and/or urban renewal streets (Kneeland, Marginal...more than one way to try it). Then hitting the pre-provisioned trajectory into the Transitway at the north tip of Chinatown Park. And keep in mind: as BRT the Essex tunnel was to be so godawful dog slow that nearly all service would be forced to loop from either side at Boylston for dispatching sanity. So a trolley on fixed track is going to make this trip faster than SL Phase III ever would've even if the path is no longer straight as the crow flies and looks underwhelmingly indirect on a 2D map. SL Phase III would've been way, way worse than the Transitway crawl.

There are two broad options for connecting the Transitway to the Green Line system as a whole: Either you connect from Park St or you connect from Kenmore (let's ignore a new E line trunk for now). the south side, in my opinion, has far more capacity to give than anything routed through Park St. Given the narrow street geometry near Boylston, I don't see any sort of track curve happening to bring anything from Kenmore down south to reconnect to the Tremont subway. Far better, in my mind, to simply follow Van's suggestion of using the widened tunnel near Arlington to bury a new tunnel under Boylston and Chinatown. The costs are high, yes, but if it means actually being able to feed the Seaport rather than sacrificing overall system capacity I think it's worth it.

It's less about having a "favorite" routing than maximizing the build odds...because we should've already had this but those bulleted pitfalls above torpedoed the cost. It's a billions-dollar project, but we want a "buildable" digit stuck onto the front.
As above, think efficiency + minimal pitfalls to lift up the Seaport connection to the realm of buildability. Tremont tunnel is 4 tracks...right there you've got grade separation for 2 branches. Can you utilize 2 tracks for the Seaport branch and 2 tracks for the Dudley branch? Or can you plow that 4-track tunnel past Tufts station down Tremont, set up 2 of the tracks to go to the Seaport + Dudley, and leave a 2-track stub to continue west as the "new" E to Back Bay + Prudential. Such that the Huntington tunnel eventually gets extended to become an "alt. spine".

Now let's bring back the new E-Trunk. This new tunnel gives us another way of reaching the Seaport from the south: merely continue the tunnel forward with a wye where you would otherwise turn to hit Boylston. This lets you route traffic from the north and south into the Seaport. I like it as a solution, and will probably integrate it into future thoughts. Under this system you'd essentially be trading one E-Trunk branch for a Seaport branch at Park St.

For the record, I was considering one of the two tracks to continue west under Stuart or Marginal, and dedicate the other to Seaport/Dudley traffic.

As in my last reply, that's way way too many northern branches to dispatch...and the fact that the non-UR additions are subject to the chaos of hard-to-control grade crossings offset too far from nearest traffic lights means schedule dominoes are going to start falling regularly.

Look again at the map. Only three lines are actually going into Lechmere from the north. There's a bit of dispatching trouble possible at the new maintenance yards, but at no point would more than three lines ever be sharing tracks:

• Urban Ring, Malden to Downtown, Malden to Kendall across the bridge into Sullivan
• Medford Branch, Porter Branch, Malden to Downtown through Lechmere into Downtown.
• Porter Branch, Malden to Kendall and Urban Ring along a short stretch between the maintenance yards and where the Grand Junction splits off.

Now, that's a lot of line interweaving but there's no point at which it becomes a crisis, especially given that two of the lines are completely traffic separated.

The Cambridge Ring is absolutely positively essential. Kenmore is the tie-in destination, because the south-half Ring that's going to have to be BRT originates there. Filet service between the Kenmore circuit and Harvard Branch as suitable, but anyone waiting on the westbound platform at Kendall surface station must be able to hit Kenmore on at least every other train. Bio-metropolis over in Cambridge needs to be able to pick up a quick transfer to Longwood; that shouldn't even be a question.

How is traffic getting routed at Kenmore then? If it's continuing straight into Back Bay then I don't see the point of any of it. At what point does someone get on the train along the Urban ring to go all the way through Kendall and BU just to get to Park St? If the traffic is bounding back out along the C or D, then reconfiguring the tracks is going to be a monster to allow that. And if we're bounding back out along the B then Kenmore is a terminal station on the Urban Ring? That seems reasonable, but I'd be worried about trains sitting on active B platforms.

Watertown's pretty straightforward. It'd be about 3/4 mile of street-running (though perhaps with reservation'ed platforms) on Arsenal St. at the very tail end...not enough length to kill an inbound schedule to Lechmere. But other than that the routing is very direct and structurally simple (2 shallow duck-unders of Sherman St. and Fresh Pond Pkwy. being the most concrete poured). On cost and buildability it's a good one. It's just not as mission-critical as the biggies. We REALLY REALLY need the Seaport connection, the NW+NE Ring quadrants, Dudley streetcar, the Porter transfer, Needham (for all the well-documented RER-driven reasons), and the E Back Bay relocation. Watertown just doesn't have any oxygen when that's the five-alarm needs list.

Hence why I didn't include it. There's a dozen ways out from there, all of them reasonably priced and of reasonable ridership to alleviate Red Line congestion at the end, but none of them that are of high importance.

Also, I start to get nervous extending any line out from there too far. You quickly start looping back on yourself over absurdly long dispatch distances if you send D or E out there, which you have to if you want to maintain branches as traffic separated.

As I said, that's just too many northern branches. And that's a bad thing if the extras exert any destabilizing effect on a load-bearing branch like the Urban Ring segments. Or Medford, for that matter...that one's got insane potential to completely blow its projections out of the water and require more service. And you can't do much more than is already going up. Lechmere is a pretty snug fit across the street, so there isn't a turnback until Brattle Loop. The problem with having crossing-heavy branches added to the 2 grade separated GLX's and the 2 very nearly grade separated Ring routes is that if one of these extra builds stubs its toes in crossing traffic in Malden it's already started dragging the rest down for several stops before it ever gets the chance to dump out at Brattle. And that's doubly ungood for whatever other branches are running at much denser frequencies when they get tripped up (like two 3-min. headway 3-car trains becoming late because of a 6-min. headway 2-car train, and relative numbers of riders impacted).

I absolutely agree that keeping completely traffic-separated branches apart from non-separated branches is critical, but I don't see any way to really do that unless we're limiting ourselves to two northside branches for all time (or biting the bullet and picking out new downtown tunnel locations. An alternative is to send all of the Urban Ring/Malden branches down the Grand Junction, but I don't think that riders there are going to love needing to make odd transfers to get downtown.